Is 2026 Finally the "Year of the Housing Factory" in California?
If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know I’m obsessed with one thing: finding a better way to get more people into homes. We’ve been talking about the California housing crisis for decades, but the solution always seems to be stuck in the same slow, expensive mud of traditional construction. Lately, there’s a buzz in Sacramento that feels a bit like back to the future. State legislators, led by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, are making a hard push to make 2026 the Year of the Housing Factory. But before we get too excited, let’s keep it real—we’ve heard this "revolution" story before. The Ghost of Housing Past Back in 1971, George Romney (HUD Secretary at the time) predicted that within a decade, two-thirds of all U.S. housing would be industrialized. He was standing in front of a factory-built home in Michigan that looked like "a boxcar with picture windows." Fast forward five years: the federal money ran out, the vision tanked, and the dream of the fa...